A Study on Differences between Expert and Novice Designers in Design Thinking Process

This study analyzes the differences between expert and novice designers in approaching the design thinking process. It shows that expert designers use a wide range of tools and techniques to help them take the right decisions through each stage, while novice designers use fewer tools. The study also highlights the difficulties faced by designers during the design thinking process.

Part 3- Methodology
For this project, individual interviews were conducted with eleven designers. Out of them, four
people were expert designers and seven people were novice designers. The expert designers
were selected from different backgrounds such as management, engineering, and
information technology. All of the expert designers who were selected for this study had
work experiences of about 7 to 35 years. Most of the novice designers who had been selected
for this study were graduate students from the mechanical engineering department,
Manufacturing engineering department and Industrial engineering department at XU. All of the
novice designers had less than two years of design experience. Eleven questions were asked to
each participant, and the interviewees were allowed the freedom to express their opinions. The
time allocated for each subject to complete the interview was 45 min to 60 min. (A copy of the
interview questions is attached in Appendix A.).
The interview questions were guided by evidence based design thinking framework
shown in Figure 1.
This framework was implemented by Tim Brown, Chief Executive Officer of IDEO and is a
popular design and innovation consulting firm that has been established in Palo Alto, California,
in 1991. Design thinking is seen to use components from the designer toolkit like that of
experimentation as well as empathy for arriving at different types of innovative solutions.
Studies are of the opinion that by utilisation of the designer thinking method, one can make good
decisions that remain based on the different aspects that the future customers might like and want
in place of depending entirely on the historical information or like that of undertaking risky bets
that remain solely based on instincts in place of evidence. Tim Brown had stated “Design
thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to

integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business
success”. Researchers are of the opinion that thinking as a designer can successfully help in
transforming the ways organizations can form products, procedures, strategy and services. The
approach that IDEO refers as design thinking helps in bringing together the attributes that are
desirable from the point of view of humans with what is technologically feasible and
economically viable. It is also seen to be helpful for people who are not trained as designers as
they help them to use creative tools for addressing a wide variety of challenges.
The design thinking procedure is best considered if as a system comprising of overlapping steps
rather than a sequence of orderly steps. Three important spaces need to be kept in minds which
are inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
The three stages of the IDEO framework are:
Inspiration: This stage is mainly considered the problem of the opportunity that helps in
motivating the search of the solutions. In this stage, the designer tries to understand the problem
and collect data about it.
Ideation: This can be considered as the procedure of generating, developing as well as testing of
different ideas. The ideation stage is the “birth of an idea,” stage and is described as the stage of
creating, developing, and testing ideas.

Implementation: This stage can be considered as the path that results in leading from the project
stage into that of the lives of the people. This stage deals with the implementation of the ideas
(Brown, 2009).
Figure 1: IDEO Design Thinking Stages
Data Analysis
After all the interviews were completed, the data was analyzed for patterns and themes and,
then, they were compared for relationships and differences. Then, a cognition map for novice
and expert designers was created based on this analysis (See Figure 2.).

Figure 2: Themes and patterns show how data was analyzed
Part 4- Findings and mind map
There are striking differences between expert and novice designers in making decisions and
approaching each stage during the design thinking process. Those differences are shown in Table
1 and Table 2 below:
Table 1: Differences between expert and novice designers in approaching design thinking
process
Statistics
Table 2: Expert and novice designers’ evaluation for design thinking stages
Discussion
The results show that expert designers use a wide range of tools and techniques to help them
take the right decisions through each stage. On the other hand, the novice designers use fewer
tools while taking decisions through the design thinking process. This aspect might affect
their abilities to generate more creative ideas.

Expert designers tend to spend more time defining the problem and gathering the data about it.
This indicates that they are looking at the big picture instead of putting themselves in a narrow
scope. As a result, they find that the ideation and implementation stages are straightforward and
less time-consuming.
In contrast, novice designers tend to spend less time understanding the problem and gathering the
data about it. This indicates that they follow a narrow scope to reach the solutions. For this
reason, the ideation stage becomes convoluted and time-consuming for them.
Moreover, the expert designers enjoy overlapping the design stages as they believe that there is
always room for improvement. They also believe that the overlapping between the stages will
enhance the quality of their design. On the contrary, the novice designers do not show the
confidence to go back to the previous stages while proceeding further in the design thinking
process. This is because the majority asserted that deciding to go back to previous stages
might result in more errors and unexpected results.
Regarding the difficulties that the designers face during the design thinking process, it is
evident that both expert and novice designers believe that communication is one of the problems
they face in particular stages. These mainly occur during the stages where they converge together
and try to implement their ideas.
Finally, the expert designers seem to be more confident than the novice designers in the
contribution to the design process. (See figure 3)
Figure 3: Designers’ confidence level during the design thinking process (experts vs. novices).